In Pack of Two, the author of the acclaimed best seller Drinking: A Love Story tackles a different sort of relationship. Two-time Academy Award-winning actress Hilary Swank (Boys Don’t Cry, Million Dollar Baby) guides us into the life of Caroline Knapp who, after losing both parents to cancer and breaking off a two-decade long relationship with alcohol in the span of one year, struggles - and succeeds - to redefine her world. The unlikely solution to Knapp’s task was found in the form of a dog named Lucille.

Drinking: A Love Story

Fifteen million Americans a year are plagued with alcoholism. Five million of them are women. Many of them, like Caroline Knapp, started in their early teens and began to use alcohol as "liquid armor", a way to protect themselves against the difficult realities of life. In this extraordinarily candid and revealing memoir, Knapp offers important insights not only about alcoholism, but about life itself and how we learn to cope with it.

Appetites: Why Women Want

In Appetites, Caroline Knapp confronts Freud’s famous question, "What do women want?” and boldly reframes it, asking instead: How does a woman know, and then honor, what it is she wants in a culture bent on shaping, defining, and controlling her desires? Knapp, best-selling author of Drinking: A Love Story and Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs, has turned her brilliant eye towards how a woman’s appetite - for food, love, work, and pleasure - has become a battlefield.

Through a Dog's Eyes

Few people are more qualified to speak about the abilities and potential of dogs than Jennifer Arnold, who for the past twenty years has trained service dogs for people with physical disabilities and special needs. Arnold has developed a unique understanding of dogs' capabilities, intelligence, sensitivity, and extra-sensory skills.

Drunkard: A Hard-Drinking Life

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg loved his job, his wife, and his two young sons. But he also loved to drink. Drunkard is an unflinchingly honest account of one man's descent into alcoholism and his ambivalent struggle to embrace sobriety. Sentenced to an outpatient rehab program, Steinberg discovers that twenty-eight days of therapy cannot reverse the toll taken by decades of hard drinking.

For the Love of a Dog: Understanding Emotion in You and Your Best Friend

Yes, humans and canines are different species, but current research provides fascinating, irrefutable evidence that what we share with our dogs is greater than how we differ. As behaviorist and zoologist Dr. Patricia McConnell tells us in this remarkable new book about emotions in dogs and in people, more and more scientists accept the premise that dogs have rich emotional lives, exhibiting a wide range of feelings, including fear, anger, surprise, sadness, and love.

Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

In Let's Take the Long Way Home, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gail Caldwell offers a powerful and moving memoir about her coming-of-age in mid-life and her extraordinary friendship with Caroline Knapp, the author of Drinking: A Love Story. Though they are more different than alike, these two fiercely private, independent women quickly relax into a friendship more profound than either of them expected. They grow increasingly inseparable until, in 2003, Caroline is diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer.

Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship with Cats and Dogs

In this fascinating exploration of the changing status of dogs and cats in society, pet lover and award-winning journalist David Grimm explores the rich and surprising history of our favorite companion animals. He treks the long and often torturous path from their wild origins to their dark days in the middle ages to their current standing as the most valued animals on Earth. For pet lovers or anyone interested in how we decide who gets to be a “person” in today’s world, Citizen Canine is a must-have. It is a pet tale like no other.

The Human Comedy

In World War II-era California, Homer Macauley and his mother, sister, and three brothers live out struggles and dreams that reflect those of America’s second-generation immigrants. Homer, determined to become one of the fastest telegraph messengers in the West, finds himself caught between reality and illusion as delivering his messages of wartime brings him face-to-face with human emotion at its most naked and raw.

Scent of the Missing: Love and Partnership with a Search-and-Rescue Dog

After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, Susannah Charleson was so impressed by the newspaper photo of an exhausted handler and his search-and-rescue dog that she decided to train a dog of her own. A dog lover and pilot with search experience herself, Charleson got Puzzle, a strong, bright Golden Retriever, who from the start, exhibited a unique aptitude for search-and-rescue work. But the puppy’s willfulness challenged even Susannah, who had raised dogs for years.

Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol

In Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol, award-winning journalist Anne Dowsett Johnston combines in-depth research with her own personal story of recovery, and delivers a groundbreaking examination of a shocking yet little recognized epidemic threatening society today: the precipitous rise in risky drinking among women and girls. With the feminist revolution, women have closed the gender gap in their professional and educational lives. They have also achieved equality with men in more troubling areas as well.

The Member of the Wedding

The best way to experience this classic of the American South is by joining five-time Academy Award nominee and Best Actress winner Susan Sarandon (Dead Man Walking, Thelma & Louise) as she guides the listener on a journey through the anguish of adolescence and isolation.

In a Dog's Heart: What Our Dogs Need, Want, and Deserve--and the Gifts We Can Expect in Return

Jennifer Arnold has a unique and profound understanding of the human-dog bond. Though it may seem simple and instinctive, the friendship and devotion we share with our pets is a wondrous evolutionary development. Our two species have come to rely on each - other for protection, companionship, comfort, and happiness - needs and benefits that go both ways. As the founder of Canine Assistants, Arnold has implemented and advanced a methodology that pairs scientific and behavioral knowledge about dogs with gentle incentive and encouragement to extraordinary effect.

What the Dog Knows: The Science and Wonder of Working Dogs

Cat Warren is a university professor and former journalist with an admittedly odd hobby: She and her German shepherd have spent the last seven years searching for the dead. Solo is a cadaver dog. What started as a way to harness Solo’s unruly energy and enthusiasm soon became a calling that introduced Warren to the hidden and fascinating universe of working dogs, their handlers, and their trainers.

Drunk Mom: A Memoir

A best seller in its native Canada, Drunk Mom is a gripping, brutally honest memoir of motherhood in the shadow of alcoholism. Three years after giving up drinking, Jowita Bydlowska found herself throwing back a glass of champagne like it was ginger ale. It was a special occasion: a party celebrating the birth of her first child. It also marked Bydlowska's immediate, full-blown return to crippling alcoholism.

Double Double: A Dual Memoir of Alcoholism

Double Double is a unique and honest dual memoir of alcoholism, a disease that affects nearly 45 million Americans each year. Now, award-winning mystery writer Martha Grimes and her son, Ken Grimes, offer two points of view on their struggles with alcoholism. In alternating chapters, they share their stories - stories of drinking, recovery, relapse, friendship, travel, work, success, and failure.

Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet

Dogs have been mankind's faithful companions for tens of thousands of years, yet today they are regularly treated as either pack-following wolves or furry humans. The truth is, dogs are neither - and our misunderstanding has put them in serious crisis. What dogs really need is a spokesperson, someone who will assert their specific needs.

How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain

How Dogs Love Us answers the age-old question of dog lovers everywhere and offers profound new evidence that dogs should be treated as we would treat our best human friends: with love, respect, and appreciation for their social and emotional intelligence.

The Possibility Dogs: What a Handful of 'Unadoptables' Taught Me about Service, Hope, and Healing

From the author of the critically acclaimed bestseller, Scent of the Missing, comes a heartwarming and inspiring story that shows how dogs can be rescued and can rescue in return. For her first book, Susannah Charleson was praised for her unique insight into the kinship between humans and dogs, as revealed through canine search and rescue. In The Possibility Dogs Charleson chronicles her journey into the world of psychiatric-service and therapy dogs trained to serve the human mind, a journey that began as a personal one. After a particularly grisly search led to a struggle with PTSD, Charleson credits healing to her partnership with search dog Puzzle. Inspired by that experience and having met dogs formally trained to assist in such crises, Charleson learns to identify abandoned dogs with service potential, often plucking them from shelters at the last minute, and to train them for work beside hurting partners, to whom these second-chance dogs bring intelligence, comfort, and hope.

The Divinity of Dogs: True Stories of Miracles Inspired by Man's Best Friend

The Divinity of Dogs is about the moments you learn something profound about life from an experience with a dog. Featuring more than 70 stories culled from hundreds of submissions to the author's Web site, these inspiring and heartwarming true stories show where love, tolerance, comfort, compassion, loyalty, joyfulness, and even death have provided experiences that have led to spiritual enlightenment.

Dry: A Memoir

At the request (well, it wasn't really a request) of his employers, Augusten lands in rehab, where his dreams of group therapy with Robert Downey Jr. are immediately dashed by grim reality of fluorescent lighting and paper hospital slippers. When Augusten is forced to examine himself, he finds himself in the worst trouble of all. Because when his thirty days are up, he has to return to his same drunken Manhattan life - and live it sober. Dry is the story of love, loss, and Starbucks as a Higher Power

Being There

Academy Award winner Dustin Hoffman gives an understated and exemplary performance of this satiric look at the unreality of American media culture. Chance, the enigmatic gardener, becomes Chauncey Gardiner after getting hit by a limo belonging to a Wall Street tycoon. The whirlwind that follows brings Chance to his new status of political policy advisor and possible vice presidential candidate. His garden-variety political responses, inspired by television, become heralded as visionary, and he is soon a media icon.

Pukka's Promise: The Quest for Longer-Lived Dogs

When Ted Kerasote was ready for a new dog after losing his beloved Merle - who died too soon, as all our dogs do - he knew that he would want to give his puppy Pukka the longest life possible. But how to do that? So much has changed in the way we feed, vaccinate, train, and live with our dogs from even a decade ago. In an adventure that echoes The Omnivore’s Dilemma with a canine spin, Kerasote tackles all those subjects, questioning our conventional wisdom and emerging with vital new information that will surprise even the most knowledgeable dog lovers.

A Three Dog Life: A Memoir

When Abigail Thomas’s husband, Rich, was hit by a car, his brain shattered. Subject to rages, terrors, and hallucinations, he must live the rest of his life in an institution. He has no memory of what he did the hour, the day, the year before. This tragedy is the ground on which Abigail had to build a new life. How she built that life is a story of great courage and great change, of moving to a small country town, of a new family composed of three dogs, knitting, and friendship, of facing down guilt and discovering gratitude.

The Empathy Exams: Essays

Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about each other? How can we feel another's pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other?

Publisher's Summary

In Pack of Two, the author of the acclaimed best seller Drinking: A Love Story tackles a different sort of relationship. Two-time Academy Award-winning actress Hilary Swank (Boys Don’t Cry, Million Dollar Baby) guides us into the life of Caroline Knapp who, after losing both parents to cancer and breaking off a two-decade long relationship with alcohol in the span of one year, struggles - and succeeds - to redefine her world.

The unlikely solution to Knapp’s task was found in the form of a dog named Lucille. After 18 months of sobriety, she brought home an eight-week old puppy from a local animal shelter, a puppy that became a central force in her life. Knapp brings her fresh insight into emotional and psychological issues to the complicated terrain of human-animal relationships. Along with mining her own experience with Lucille, Knapp speaks to a variety of dog people - from owners to professionals - about this profoundly healing alliance.

Pack of Two is part of Audible’s A-List Collection, featuring the world’s most celebrated actors narrating distinguished works of literature that each star had a hand in selecting. For more great books performed by Hollywood’s finest, click here.

I thought that this would be just a memoir about the author and her dog; while that was certainly a lot of the story, I was happily surprised to hear the psychological aspects of the human and dog relationship. Her life is woven in, as well as her fears and emotions about her dog and others. I could relate to her feelings about her dog, particularly her fear of being left alone once the dog was gone. I had (and still have) similar fears about my dog, so I can definitely relate to that. It was especially poignant hearing the author talking about how she knows the dog will go before her, yet knowing that she died at a young age (early 40s). I don't know if the dog actually survivied her or not, but this part struck an emotional chord with me. I also loved the part where she was examining her life and realized that while it may not be what she or others expected, she realizes that the question to as is: "does it feel right for you?" How true! After reading this book, I intend to read her book about her battle with drinking as well as her friend's book about their friendship and her untimely death. Hilary Swank did an outstanding job with the narration. You can tell that she loves dogs, as there were times in the book where you could tell the emotion was coming through.

The subtitle is very accurate, it's the story of the bond between a woman and her dog and her investigation into that bond more generally because she is so surprised by the dog's impact on her own life.

Very much a book for people who love dogs and have experienced this bond, I don't think someone who isn't a dog lover would find this as interesting as it is for those of us who have found ourselves gobsmacked in adulthood by the relationships in which we have unexpectedly developed with dogs.

The narration by Hilary Swank is excellent, although she does mis-pronounce a word or two that sort of interrupted the flow of the text for me but only because the reading was so good only that mispronunciation made it clear it was not the author reading the book. Otherwise her reading was so sincere I felt the whole time like the author was talking directly to me about the intensity of her connection to her dog.

Caroline Knapp is an excellent writer and her prose distinguishes this book from the plethora of dog books published each year. Sadly, I believe she died soon after this book was published.

Highly recommended for dog lovers and people interested in the bonds people develop with animals.

This was a fairly short book, and as a devoted dog parent, I found that it went quickly. This audiobook was narrated by Hilary Swank which added a lot to the listening experience. Pack of Two is a very personal account of the author's relationship with her dog, Lucille, and how it enriched and deepened her life. However, it provides both sides of the dog/human bond, including some of the very special benefits as well as darker aspects that, in some unfortunate cases, became pathological.

There were times when I honestly felt sorry for Caroline Knapp because she seemed so needy and isolated. I really love our three dogs and spend a great deal of time working and playing with them, but this author was truly obsessed with Lucille, her only close connection in the world. I was glad she had this wonderful being in her life, a dog she had rescued from probable euthanasia in a shelter, but she seemed so concerned with the possible abnormality of their relationship that I pitied her a little. She gave examples of friends with similar issues, a few of whom were pretty scary. Her own background was quite tragic, involving a lonely childhood, struggles with anorexia, and alcoholism. Her relationship with her dog in her mid-thirties was the first in her life that felt authentic and satisfying.

As a pretty fanatic animal lover myself, I identified with her devotion to her dog, and I enjoyed the book mostly. I only wish her life had been happier in other ways. She died several years after writing this book of lung cancer, and I can't help wondering what happened to Lucille when Caroline was no longer there to care for her. I can only hope a family member or friend has adopted the dog and continued to provide her with the love and devotion she had come to depend upon. We owe our animals that for the many gifts they give us.

This audio book was a good listen for in-between a Fantasy series I am listening to, but it felt a lot like reading a college paper. This book was a combination of autobiography and research article, with a lot of emotion intertwined. I appreciate the openness and honesty of the author and the people she interviewed. I only gave three stars because I don't feel any different about dogs or dog people after listening to this audio book, and I think all the language the author used could have been boiled down to a really good 2 hr. T.V. special or radio interview.

Would you consider the audio edition of Pack of Two to be better than the print version?

I rate Hilary Swank as an actress and thought she read the book empathetically and with appreciation of the profound relationship we can have with a dog. I cannot comment on whether or not the audio edition could be considered to be 'better' than the print version. An odd question really, as I'm unlikely to both read the print version and listen to the audio version of the same book.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Pack of Two?

One of the most memorable moments in the book for me was the author's explanation relating to the "it's just a dog" comments from non-dog-owneres. In that, just as you cannot truly appreciate the strength of the relationship between parent and child until you become a parent, it is impossible to truly appreciate the same between a person and their dog until you have experienced it for yourself.

Have you listened to any of Hilary Swank’s other performances? How does this one compare?

I haven't listened to any other books performed by Hilary Swank.

If you made a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

But for the love of a dog. . .

Any additional comments?

I feel that only dog lovers will enjoy this book and be able to appreciate that the dog 'saved' this lady. She was able to find something profoundly special in her life after a lot of heartache. It is so sad to have learned she has now passed away.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

J-P

6/17/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"Look elsewhere for puppy love!"

Brilliantly narrated, profound and humane depiction of the power of the love for, and from, (wo)man's best friend!

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Ms. V. Cistiakovaite

London

11/24/13

Overall

Performance

Story

"Very VERY Special"

I tend to read a lot of quite shallow romantic novels because I find them relaxing so this book is very different from the norm for me but it was such a special book which will stay with me for a long time. I was extremely shocked to find out having finished the book that the author is sadly deceased. It portrays the relationships between people and dogs wonderfully and it is extremely informative and intriguing. A beautiful book. I think I will reread it in the future. It is extremely easy to read/ listen to. I think anyone who loves dogs will love this book.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

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